Broadband News

KC announces acceleration of its fibre roll-out

Kingston Upon Hull which relies largely on KC for its telephone and
broadband services looks set to see a much faster roll-out of the KC
Lightstream service as the previous 30,000 premises planned for the next two
years has now doubled to 60,000, which should mean coverage hits 105,000 in
2017.

"This is fantastic news for Hull and its growing digital economy, giving our
residents and businesses – both current and future – access to state-of-the-art
internet connectivity.

KC’s investment also supports us in our ambition to establish the city as a
leading hub for digital technologies, alongside developments like the C4DI
digital hub in the Fruit Market and the recently announced Ron Dearing
University Technical College. It’s another milestone in the city of Hull’s
transformation and provides the platform for further exciting developments
ahead.

Councillor Stephen Brady, Leader of Hull City Council

The faster roll-out is still almost exclusively Fibre to the Home or Fibre
to the Premises if you are a business and is available to some 45,000 premises
already meaning that a variety of options are
available with 100 Mbps being the fastest package currently.

To help understand what the roll-out means we asked KC to confirm the
approximate number of premises that are inside the KC footprint and a figure of
208,000 was supplied. So while the KC roll-out accounts for around 15% of the
UK FTTH footprint (175,000 Openreach, 100,000 Hyperoptic, 45,000 KC, ~1000
B4RN, ~2000 Gigaclear plus an unknown number from IFNL and others) it does mean
that in terms of coverage people may have to wait longer compared to most other
parts of the UK for something beyond the old ADSL2+ services. The 2 Mbps USC
was met by KC sometime ago, helped by the roll-out of ADSL2+ and relatively
short distances between premises and exchanges.